The Battle of Britain Five Months That Changed History, May—October 1940 by James Holland (z-lib.org).epub

wartime is something that cannot be understood by someone who has not
experienced it. A squadron – or Staffel – was a very close, tight-knit bunch
of young men. Most preferred to put the losses out of their mind, but it was
not always that easy, especially when it was particularly close friends or
even family. On 12 September, Arthur Hughes learned that his brother,
Dave, a Hurricane pilot with 238 Squadron, was missing. Two days earlier,
Arthur had been given an overseas posting, to help a Free French squadron
in West Africa. In the knowledge that he had miraculously survived the
current battle, he had been looking forward to his sister’s wedding that
coming weekend. He knew this meant his ‘dear brother’ was dead. ‘Poor
Kathleen, poor parents,’ he scribbled. His brother would have been twentythree
in two weeks’ time. ‘This is the end of my youth, and who knows
what the future will bring?’
Arthur did not record whether he drowned his sorrows that night, but
certainly the drink helped most people. ‘You anaesthetized yourself with a
good old jar of beer,’ says Tony Bartley. ‘You flew all day and fought all
day and then you played all night.’
Bomber crews would spend a fair amount of time drinking too. Andrew
Jackson and his crew would invariably head to the pub once they knew they
would not be flying that night. Arthur Hughes would often go to parties in
King’s Lynn or there might be a big drinking session in the mess. One
evening in August, a spontaneous mess party developed and they all got so
drunk they began playing ‘High Cock-a-Lorum’, which involved one team
getting in a line, each man’s head between the legs of the man in front, and
then members of the other team taking a running leap and trying to land as
far along the backs as possible. Inevitably, there were injuries, one of them
cracking his skull open, which required three stitches. ‘This morning he was
very perky,’ jotted Arthur the next day, ‘and claimed never to have felt
better.’
Luftwaffe pilots would drink in the evening but by and large there was
not quite the same degree of careless abandon about their drinking sessions
as there was in the RAF. Siegfried Bethke felt there was an important
difference between the two sides that summer. ‘They knew exactly what
was at stake that summer,’ he says. ‘Our motivation and conviction was of a
different dimension. We wanted to be successful but we didn’t have a
national goal.’ The Luftwaffe pilots and crews were also more disciplined,
more sober in their approach. Luftwaffe Staffeln would not have been